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Monday, 28 August 2017

The Mist has always been one of my favorite
Stephen King stories. For me it tapped into a fear of civilized society being
overtaken by a sudden disaster, and how an every day trip to the supermarket
could turn into a frightening fight for survival. But what made it stand out
was the way it presented this fear in a totally unique, visceral, and visual
way by engulfing the town in a physical manifestation of the unknown – a
maddening, mysterious mist, filled with unseen monsters bent on tearing apart
the town’s inhabitants. What could possibly be more frightening?

In the
post-new-millennium era where our fascination with ‘end times’ fiction shows no
signs of slowing, The Mist, published in the early 80’s, stands out as a
frightful premonition of pop culture’s present obsession with the end of the
world. So you would think The Mist’s TV adaptation would not only be
timely, but considering the quality of the source material, a total slam-dunk
in today’s apocalypse-obsessed age. The Frank Darabont movie adaptation has
become a horror classic, so The Mist more than proved itself capable of
being translated from novel to film. What could go wrong?

[Yep -
spoiler alert!]

Well, as I
watched the first episode of The Mist TV series, my excitement turned to
complete disappointment soon after the mist rolled into town. As the mist
claimed its first victim (a clueless cop taking a selfie in the mist no less! I
really can’t stand the idiot victim trope! g.s.) I suddenly realized the mist had no
monsters in it. Not one friggin’ monster! The TV Mist had totally missed
the point of the mist! The heart of the mist’s terror – a mysterious fog
harboring a host of other-worldly creatures, unseen until it was far too late –
had been lost.

The writers
instead turned the mist into some sort of reactive supernatural force that
probes your deepest fears and then tears you apart with its physical
manifestation. While interesting, the execution never proved remotely
terrifying, just occasionally gross. Why they chose to tool around with this
fundamental concept is beyond me. The monsters werethe coolest part of
the entire story, and discarding them for some sort of vengeful fog was the biggest mistake of the new
series.

The next misstep the TV Mist took was not having a suspenseful, tense, or even coherent narrative. In the novel, I was fascinated to watch the characters devolve from a group
of civilized townsfolk into a desperate, murderous mob as the horror of their
situation sunk in. The TV Mist tried to follow suit, setting up tons of
potential tension amongst the town’s inhabitants: Alex’s alleged rape by Jay,
Jonah’s memory loss and his connection to Arrowhead, and Mia’s drug addiction
and criminal past. Frustratingly, none of these scenarios played out in a
coherent or interesting way, and all just ended up feeling pointless. Jay is
exonerated but then randomly killed; Jonah is captured by an Arrowhead soldier
only to be inexplicably released (because of Jonah’s higher rank? What?); Mia’s
betrayal of the group to grab some dope and cash goes nowhere and falls flat.

Perhaps the
most disappointing scene was when Eve confessed to the angry mob that Conner
was Alex’s dad. None of the actors had the chops to pull off the emotional
weight of that scene, and the crowds’ reaction to the news seemed random and
non-sensical. Eve wasn’t set up properly as the pariah she needed to be for the
town to turn on her and Alex. The whole situation inside the mall seemed forced
as the writers pushed the plot forward with cardboard characters and weak
motives, instead of really digging into the characters and letting their
development allow the story to unfold.

And perhaps
most frustrating to watch was Adrian’s transformation from victim to villain.
Did it really have to be the one LBGT character who turns out to be the evil
psycho, while the pretty boy quarterback gets exonerated as the hero? It made
me sigh internally that the series was brave enough to introduce a gay
character but backward enough to then turn around and make him the bad guy.

The one
shining light in the mist (sorry) was Frances Conroy as Natalie Raven. Her
subtle transformation from docile garden-loving hippie to calculating
instrument of the mist was fantastic to watch. But once again, the writers set
up something interesting and then let it fall totally flat. Natalie’s arrival
at the mall should have been her momentous ascension to messiah of the mist,
but instead the writers just randomly killed her off. (What?!) Why did the mist
suddenly turn on its chosen disciple after sparing her when she faced off
against Father Romanov? It was the final random kick in the teeth that made me
totally not care to watch season two (if there is one.)

Considering
the source material was quite short, the challenges of transcribing The Mist
into a 10-hour series are obvious. But in trying to take the story in a different
direction, the writers totally lost what made the original novella so cool –
the fear of unseen, otherworldly predators; the fear of neighbors turning on
each other in the face of a local disaster; the fear of the unknown. When I saw
The Mist pop up on my Netflix feed, I was super excited and thrilled to
watch it. Despite excellent production values, and the creepiest mist effects
you’d ever see, after slogging through 10 hours of disappointing writing and
acting, I think this new Mist totally missed. Don’t pass Go. Don’t
collect $200. And don’t watch this pile of garbage.

As you
know, gentle reader, I’ve always viewed my submission to the C4C grant as a
long shot. So while I’ve been wringing my hands for months desperately hoping
“Heroes of the Dead” might somehow pull off a win, I wasn’t terribly surprised
by the outcome.

So what
does this mean for ol’ Glen Specter, for Heroes of the Dead, and for Specter
Comics? Why, it means great things! Terrible, fantastic, horrifying things!!

As you
might have seen from my little teaser for “Rotting Hills”, I’ve got lots of
plans for Specter Comics. I’ve decided to officially make Specter Comics my platform
for self-publishing. So along with “Heroes of the Dead”, I’ve been tooling
around with another zombie idea geared towards kids called “Rotting Hills”. I
mean, can you think of one successful zombie comic for kids? Me neither! So
there’s definitely a niche to fill.

“Rotting
Hills” began life (sorry :P) as a cartoon idea I successfully pitched, produced
and directed over a decade ago (god I'm old!). While the animated cartoon died when the production company
ultimately passed on the idea, I thought it high time to resurrect Rotting
Hills in comic book form! If you’re curious, the cartoon looked like this. My
plans for the comic book are a little different, as I have no right to the
stories or artwork of the original production, but I’m really excited by some
of the ideas I’ve come up for it!

Thus,
whilst old man Specter had been beaten down and had his old withering heart
crushed by the above news, I also feel liberated. For the months I was waiting
on news about the grant, I felt trapped in limbo as I didn’t want to proceed with
anything until the grant was settled. Now I’m free to go whole hog into
self-publishing and see where it leads me.

My plan is
to get a “Specter Comics” website up and running to serve as a portal to
Comixology, Amazon’s big giant online comic book store. comixology.com

From there
I’ll be publishing “Heroes of the Dead” #1 very shortly and see how it does!
And the good news is I’ve already finished the scripts for issues #2 and #3, so
work on the art will begin forthwith!

As for
Rotting Hills, I’ve been working away at a script for the first issue. I’ll be
posting progress for that project here on Dying to Draw as well so stay tuned!

Monday, 5 December 2016

Remember in
"The Shawshank Redemption", how Andy (played by Tim Robbins) escapes
his life sentence in prison by slowly digging a tunnel behind his poster of
Rita Hayworth? How he dug for years and years, a little spoonful of dirt out of
the wall each day, quietly dumpingthe tiny bit of dirt and stone in the yard?
How he continued this until the hole grew large enough that he could finally
make his escape, crawling through a tunnel of shit a mile long to emerge a free
man?

Now you're thinking, "He's gonna say this is a metaphor for his life, and that creating comic books is his tunnel of freedom away from the prison of a stagnant, working-wage career...yada yada yada."

And you'd be absolutely wrong. Ha. Because, I used to believe this - that to be happy I needed to somehow escape my life, to scorch the earth and free myself from the invisible shackles of responsibility that come with a salaried job in order to fulfill my life as an artist. To suceed. And five years ago, I largely did that, leaving my safe but intolerable career in animation for the more uncertain life of a contract freelancer, understanding that this move would give me less money but more freedom to work on my own projects.

So five years later, I'm still struggling with balancing paid work and creating something meaningful of my own. And I'm slowly realizing that there might not be a magical moment of freedom, where I look around at my life and say "I've finally made it." And I think that's because when you get into a mindset where you struggle to "make it", and don't understand what that means exactly, you will be forever stuck, dissatisfied and struggling, because the state of "making it" is a fantasy. There is no moment in life like this because life is a slippery slope of expectation and achievement, so completely changeable and nebulous that any moment where you can say "I've made it" or "I've achieved something" is so fleeting that it seems almost pointless.

My personal journey these last few years has seen me constantly searching the horizon for that place, that special moment where I could be satisfied with what I have; some magical reality I could finally settle myself down into a comfortable life of pleasant routine, free of worry, free of doubt, creating meaningful things and feeling fulfilled. Needless to say, I was shit off my rocker to think I could ever achieve a sustainable situation like that. But this is an idea that's sold to us everyday, that somehow if you amass enough money, power, or material stuff, you'll find that G-spot of happiness to last the rest of your life.

So I've come to realize I've been looking in the wrong place for my tunnel to freedom. It's not out there somewhere, it's in here - inside my head. Because that's where my reality begins and ends. So I might look at my life and not be satisfied, or I might wish for something I might never attain, or struggle and fight and hate how little I seem to have while everyone else seems to have it so easy. Or I could stop - dig through the noise of what society tells me success means - and find my black hole to freedom right now. Because it's right there in your head. All you need is the courage to say "screw expectation" and crawl through it.

There's no such thing as an end point to success. Life will never settle down into something comfortable (not with two kids to raise, at least!) And I don't think I want it to be comfortable, because I know it would eventually become boring. I'm looking at my life and I realize I have so much, that in many ways I've "made it". So I've decided to try and calm down about the struggle, the striving for success, and enjoy all the good things I have. Because all of it is fleeting, and we should appreciate what we have now before it all slips away.

This is perhaps a bit deeper than I would have liked to go in this post, but I'm feeling philosophical of late, mostly as I come to terms with the reality that I probably didn't win the C4C grant contest (as I haven't heard anything yet and it's been over a month now.) So I'm trying to understand what it means to me, and realize it's not the end of the world, and that I'm lucky to even have had the opportunity to submit something.

Just a note of irony - at the end of Shawshank Redemption, we see Andy's friend Red released from prison, and in the final scene Red finds Andy on the beach in some tropical paradise, fixing up his yacht. So yeah, even that movie tries to sell us the whole happy ending thing. All I'm saying is that most of us are already there, even if we don't realize it. You don't need a billion dollars and a yacht on the beach to be happy. All you need is a roof over your head and a family that loves you. So get yourself into your black hole and out of the prison in your mind. That happy ending isn't as far off as you think.

Tuesday, 18 October 2016

Okay folks, you heard it here first! I submitted my proposal package to the "CreatorForCreators" grant program! (found at creatorsforcreators.org ) Woohoo! I still can't believe I hit send. I just about collapsed from the stress! These old bones are not made for this kind of treatment.

The last couple of days I've been agonizing over the wording of my two page proposal, and it was brutal. A good friend of mine helped me edit it, and I have to thank her for patience and insistence. She kept pushing me to break everything down until I could sum up the story in one concise sentence. Not easy, I tells you. Screenwriters call it the 'log-line', which is essentially your whole concept summed up in one or two sentences so someone can glance at it and take in the whole story.

While I hated going through the agony of it, I have to say if you're ever writing a story or script, coming up with a log-line is absolutely an essential step in the process. It forces you to dig through the bull-crap in your mind and make sure the story is working structurally at its very foundation. If you don't do this (and resist doing it like I did for some time), your story will end up a structural mess I guarantee you.

Having said all this, I'd be remiss if I didn't share the log-line I came up with for my proposal. This log-line covers "Hearts of Darkness", the first "Heroes of the Dead" story arc. So here ya go:

Jack O’Brien, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse who is
given unnatural powers by the zombie virus, must lure his friends into a trap
if he is to save the woman he loves from a sewer-lurking monster.

Yep, at some point Jack has to choose between his super-powered friends and the love of his life - it's a dilemma, people! And honestly, I didn't see this dilemma clearly until I went through the pain of creating this stupid log-line. But now that I have the structure of the story clearly in my head, I can now (finally) start to put meat on the bones and get writing the scripts for the next issues!

Ok - I'm happy. The comic is done and the proposal package submitted. It's been a long journey to this point and I'm happy to have shared it with you. But this isn't the end point by any means. I still have a lot of work to do! I'm continuing to write the next issues of "Heroes of the Dead" and I hope to start roughing out art for issue #2 very soon.

So stay tuned for more updates on "Heroes of the Dead"! We're just gettin' started...

As always, I continue to be your humble hagridden homunculus of the horrific,
G.S.

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

I'm making some final tweeks on my comic - some little dialogue changes here and there to make things flow better. But on this page I decided to redraw Maggie, the little psychic girl Jack meets at High Gate church (formally Sanctuary - see, little tweeks!)

I changed her design a bit (she used to be blond and generic looking), as I've been thinking about her role in the story and I've decided to make her a very important character down the road. Originally I just threw her in as a creepy girl who might portend future doom for our heroes, but as the story has evolved in my head Maggie's role has become much bigger. I plan to show her evolve into a powerful hero, one who ultimately holds the fate of the world in her hands. So yeah, I thought I'd better make her cool looking! I'm happier with her look here, so I thought I'd share it on the blog.

So with this final art revision done, I think the comic is ready to go! I'm nervously assembling the proposal package and plan to hit "Send" in the next couple of days. It sort of feels like everything I've been working for is suddenly pivoting on this one contest (which is probably a stupid and unrealistic frame of mind considering my odds of winning). Anyway, I will make a post once the ship has sailed!

Thursday, 8 September 2016

Well,
summer break is finally over and my little gremlins are back at school. While I
don’t usually like to post about my personal life on this blog , I will say
this: my summer has felt like a journey through the “Upside Down”, that
bizarre, dark reflection of our world on the show “Stranger Things”. Now that
the house is quiet and I sit here in front of my keyboard after a long hiatus,
I feel like I’ve finally crawled through some slimy inter-dimensional portal
back into reality after two months of wandering surreal, supernatural wastes.
Yep, my summer with the kids was a complete blur of craziness.

The truth
is I love my two boys and have moments of absolute joy with them, but the daily
slog of parenting can be so gut-wrenchingly painful, I imagine I feel what Will
felt after staying in the Upside Down for too long (although I’ve never puked
up a giant monster worm – yet).

I mean, my
two little bugbears (bless them) are up at 7am – every single day – regardless
of how late daddy went to bed (sometimes 2-3am). This means I’m forced to peel
myself out of my coffin (aka bed) to prepare breakfast and basically make sure
nothing terrible befalls them (the gloomy crypt in which I make my abode is
rife with unseen pitfalls – some mundane, some unnatural – but mostly I have to
make sure the two boys don’t kill each other.)

Now that I
have returned from that black plane of otherworldly oblivion you call ‘summer
vacation”, I finally have some time to ruminate on one of the high points of my
perilous summer – watching “Stranger Things” on Netflix.

Something
about this unassuming homage to 80’s sci-fi/horror flicks really wormed it’s
way into my brain (sorry Barb). In just about every way, “Stranger Things” hit
the mark of awesomeness. The story was paced well (difficult for a serialized
tv show – I’m looking at you, LOST!), I got to know and root for the characters
(even Nancy’s douche-bag boyfriend Steve, thanks to a redemptive story-arc),
and I was genuinely freaked out by the monster and its habit of crossing
dimensions to stalk its prey. A completely thrilling, mind-blowing ride!

In so many
ways, “Stranger Things” surpassed all of the 80’s movies it honours. I was also
impressed that the Duffer Brothers contained the story in a tight eight episode
run (but of course at the end of it I was crying inside and dying to see more).
It kept the pace moving along well, even during the slow bits with the Nancy
love triangle or the kid’s initial bungling around in the dark looking for
Will.

Since I
love to talk story structure, and I found “Stranger Things” so awesome because
it executed a cool story so successfully, I’d like to change gears and talk
about a story not so successfully executed. Me and the wife decided to fire up
“Allegiant – Divergent part 3” to kill an evening, and about 30 minutes in I
nearly rage quit the thing. If “Stranger Things” is narrative perfection,
“Allegiant” is a big pile of narrative poop.

While I
didn’t expect much from the third part of this Hunger Games knock-off, it was
so utterly confusing that I started yelling at the screen. Why did this weird
experiment in Chicago end up producing a “pure” (meaning genetically unaltered,
I think) divergent person, Tris? How?? And why should we care? We are never
told why this process is so important, so we are left to assume something
terrible will happen. Was the human race on the brink of extinction? Who
knows??

The crux of
the story – Tris being torn between the future dude (Jeff Daniels) and her
friends in Chicago – becomes meaningless because we don’t understand what she’s
doing, or why we should care. If her dilemma was ‘save humanity from extinction
or save her friends’, that might be interesting. Needless to say, the story
fell apart and the action at the end was boring and pointless.

I like to
think that consuming different stories – good and bad – can only help me
improve my own writing, so I won’t beleaguer the point of how bad Allegiant
was. I will say this: I’d much rather brave the “Upside Down” than return to
future Chicago any day.

Thankfully,
the word on the street is that Season Two of “Stranger Things” is in the works,
so I’m looking forward to more adventures in the “Upside Down”. I only have two
apprehensions about this: 1) it’s gonna be really hard to top the first season,
so I’m bracing for disappointment 2) I only have 9 months until NEXT summer
vacation and my own adventures back to the “Upside Down”! I’ve already fitted myself
with a Haz-Mat suit for the occasion!